Deus Ex Human Revolution depicts an original sci-fi world

When it comes to science fiction worlds in the video game industry, there are just too many of them. For new video game creators, it’s getting harder to be innovative in the art design.

That was one of the problems facing the developers at Eidos Montreal (owned by publisher Square Enix), which created the big budget sci-fi game Deus Ex Human Revolution, which debuts on the Xbox 360, PC, and PlayStation 3 today. A considerable part of the cost of this game, which was in the works for more than four years, was its art budget. Deus Ex Human Revolution is turning out to be critically acclaimed — it has a high average score of 89 out of 100 on?review aggregator site Metacritic — and it stands out as a unique title in a rather lackluster summer for games.

The game’s designers wanted to push the art style of the game to new heights. But when they studied what came before them, they found lots of cliches that could turn off jaded gamers, said Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, art director on the game. The Deus Ex Human Revolution experience shows how the team avoided cliches and capitalized on its investment to make something original. Essentially, the artists had to conceive an entire world to become the home for the science fiction story.

The problem isn’t just that there are too many worlds. It’s that there are too many memorable sci-fi worlds. The movies have given us a great deal of variety, including Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Road Warrior, Minority Report, and Avatar. On top of that, there have been lots of huge hits in sci-fi video games, from Halo to Resistance: Fall of Man. Lots of those games are set in post-apocalyptic worlds, as evident in the environments of Fallout 3 and DeadSpace.

Blade Runner was so similar and so memorable that the art team went out of its way to avoid it.

“We wanted to infuse our own voice and essence,” Jacques-Belletete said.

Jacques-Belletete says he started with two principles. One was to emphasize illustration over simulation. He didn’t want everything to look real. He didn’t want people to mistake a scene for the game with a photo. Rather, he wanted each scene to look like someone painted it, sort of like the recent Assassin’s Creed games from Ubisoft.

Deus Ex Human Revolution is the third game in the Deus Ex series that debuted in 2000. Deus Ex Invisible War followed in 2003. The latest game is actually a prequel, set in the year 2027, a full 25 years before the events of Deus Ex. In Deus Ex Human Revolution, the world enters a time of confrontation and debate about the benefits and limits to augmenting humans with technology — an age dubbed the Cyber Renaissance. The player has to solve a conspiracy that stretches across five cities, including Shanghai, Detroit and Montreal.

Jacques-Belletete didn’t want to imitate the dark and gray post-apocalyptic worlds, where the distinctions between sci-fi worlds seem so minute. So his team came up with a black and gold color theme that is used throughout the game, giving it an instantly recognizable style. That shade of gold and black is visible in all sorts of scenes, with the gold showing up in the form of street lights or office lights. Gold is a symbol of the humanist Renaissance. Black is about the darkness coming for the dystopian world.

The gadgets of the world took their inspiration from the real Renaissance and the art of Leonardo Da Vinci. In many of the scenes, there is a blend of modern and Renaissance eras. There’s a touch of cyber punk as well, where old mechanical styles blend with modern technology. But the gold and black are so pervasive in the game that you can understand why the main character, Adam Jensen, always wears sunglasses.

“We were quite stoked about that,” Jacques-Belletete said. “The Cyber Renaissance put a coating over a game world.”

The game designers also infused the Renaissance and Baroque styles into the fashion of the game world. They had to create wardrobes not only for soldiers but for all of the characters in the game, as well as minor characters. The designers also had to make the world look believable, so they created around 1,300 random items from paper files to bottles of water. That added to the realism of the game. The artists also created more than 100 brands and corporations in the game.

“It’s all in the details,” Jacques-Belletete said. “Photorealism means that if you have a prop in the background, like a hat, it has to look realistic. The goal is to create emotions for the game that they can remember in the future.”

Here’s the launch trailer for the film, so you can see how well the artists succeeded in their vision for the sci-fi world.

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Tags: Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Companies: Eidos Montreal, Square Enix

People: Jonathan Jacques-Belletete

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Y Combinator’s Interstate lets you share your roadmap with the world (or your employees)

Interstate, a new application that launched today at Y Combinator‘s Demo Days, is a simple tool that allows company founders, project managers and others to share their future plans with customers, clients and even employees.

The tool works for developers working on their own as well as for larger companies — any entity that needs to communicate its roadmap to an audience. Interstate lets you do project management and share “the bits that are really important” with your clients.

The app also features a simple dashboard that gives interested parties an overview of recent progress on specific tasks and overarching goals.

At the Demo Day ground zero in Mountain View, CA, Interstate founders Simon Fletcher and Greg Cooper told us their app was “Basecamp done right.”

“If you want to share what you’re doing and you don’t want that extra work, that’s what Interstate is for,” said Cooper. “Just manage your project as usual, and we’ll automate the rest.”

When you’d like to share your roadmap, you can choose from two themes to skin it, then just paste four lines of Javascript anywhere you like.

We asked the team what kinds of people were using Interstate and what they were using it for; Cooper gave us a couple examples.

“Virb pivoted from a trendy social network to a website builder. They’re using Interstate to explain how things are moving along with their customers. And Mino Monsters are using Interstate quite a lot to plan out long term ideas, and they’re able to communicate it among their own employees. That’s a very popular option.”

Here are a handful of Interstate’s features:

Create and update roadmaps for projects or products.Create a road for each task or feature.Check the progress on specific roads and routes.Explain progress with updates, attachments, start dates and deadlines.Manage exactly who sees which bits of data.Export roadmaps as PDFsSend notifications about roadmap updates.

Currently, the app has seen strong growth, garnering 3,000 users with no advertising other than word of mouth. Customers include IBM, design community Forrst, Twitter, Seesmic, commenting system Disqus, Vimeo, car service app Uber, photo booth app Dailybooth and a slew of other web properties. The app is also being used by large universities such as Michigan State and Virginia Tech.

While the service is currently free, the Interstate founders said they do plan to start charging for it in the coming months. Eventually, they’ll introduce a freemium model. “The idea was, because we’re startup founders with a ramen noodle lifestyle, there will always be a free product for small teams and open source projects,” said Cooper.

We asked the team whether they really thought companies and developers would be willing to pay for the service. Cooper shared a rather funny story about that:

“About six months ago, we had a lump of cash in our Paypal account, and we couldn’t work out what it was. It turns out we had a bug on the website that was allowing people to send payments to us, and they were! People were trying to pay for a free app. We had to refund the money. People are still asking to pay, but we don’t want to roll it out too fast.”

The team is actively seeking funding. The two founders are from the U.K.; the team also includes a non-founder Mac developer, Alec Sloman.

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Tags: developers, project management, roadmap

Companies: interstate, Mino Monsters, Virb, Y Combinator

People: greg cooper, simon fletcher

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18-year-old’s games get 10M plays in Roblox game world

Roblox is a thriving web-based virtual world where kids can create building-block creations in Leg0-like styles. It is far more successful than other virtual worlds, and 18-year-old Luke “Stickmaster Luke” Weber is one of the reasons for that.

For the past four years, Weber has been making games within the world of Roblox. Those games have been played more than 10 million times on the Roblox site, making Weber (pictured left) into a celebrity within the Roblox community of virtual tinkerers.

With Roblox, kids are architects of their own games and they learn software coding abilities that can help them later in life. Roblox uses physics to simulate a virtual world, allowing kids to construct things in building-block style. While the games aren’t graphically outstanding, they do remind everyone that a game doesn’t have to have high-end graphics to be fun. And Weber has proven to be a master at this art.

“Roblox is like a building game,” Weber said in an interview. “I started playing because I was always playing with Legos when I was younger.”

Weber, who took the “Stickmaster Luke” nickname from his early start making stick-characters animations in Roblox, hasn’t made any money from the free games. But he has picked up some skills on how to make games that could serve him well in the years ahead. And earlier this month, Weber attended the first-ever Roblox community gathering, the Roblox Rally, which was attended by more than 1,000 people at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Lots of kids came up to meet Weber, who just graduated from high school in Pleasant Hill, Calif.

The success of Weber’s simple do-it-yourself games is one reason that Roblox is thriving. The company has 6.8 million unique visitors a month, with a total of 942 million page views a month.That has made Roblox into the second-most popular kids entertainment site, and it has enabled Roblox to raise $4 million in funding from Altos Ventures and First Round Capital. Roblox makes money from premium subscriptions, sales of in-game virtual currency, advertising and prepaid cards sold at retail outlets such as Best Buy, GameStop and Wal-Mart. Revenue at the company is up 75 percent from a year ago.

Roblox users build games by resizing virtual bricks to build scenes and characters in the Lua programming language. Then they add scripts other coding for games. The process is relatively simple and it’s a good way to learn programming. Rival game worlds include Second Life and Minecraft. All of these worlds are part of what futurist Paul Saffo calls the “creator economy,” where users aren’t satisfied with passive entertainment and want to create their own.

“I was a complete beginner when I started,” Weber said. “I made quite a few games and most of them were bad. My first hit was one that allowed players to build in real-time with each other and then fight.”

Four years ago, it was a big deal if 60 players played a game at once, but now the audience is measured in thousands. Weber copied some other games to see if he could do them better. Then he got more experimental, making games where trucks fall down a hill and you have to dodge them in order to climb to the top. Weber is pouring increasing amounts of time into each game, though only gets half-way through many games. Each full game takes about 24 hours of work to complete.

Now Weber’s “The Underground War,” (pictured above) where players dig under the ground, has crossed 4.1 million plays. A handful of other Stickermaster Luke titles have also crossed a million plays. One of his newest games is Laser Tag, pictured right. Weber has started work on around 97 different places in Roblox, but about 30 have turned into finished games.

While Weber isn’t making money from his games, he does earn in-game currency every time someone plays a game. And Weber sells virtual T-shirts for 30 “Robucks.” Making money would be nice, but Weber says, “Making games is fun. There’s some hype and notoriety in it, and it’s fun meeting new people.”

As for the future, Weber plans on going to community college.

“I feel like I can do anything now,” he said.

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Tags: Minecraft, Robucks, Second Life

Companies: Roblox

People: Luke Weber, Stickmaster Luke

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